Designing and Building communIT.

Many subgroups in the US remain marginalized from, misunderstood by, or invisible to the larger communities they reside in. Technologies supporting community building, more generally, have focused on apps, but these apps can fall short of making visible and heard subgroups such as the LGTBQ+, immigrant, and black populations. In response to this shortcoming, we report on the design iterations and an early evaluation of communIT—an interactive artifact for making visible and heard subgroups towards building community. To inform the design of communIT, we conducted in our lab a design studio study (N=57), a co-design activity with a to-scale prototype (N= 12), and a co-design activity with a full-scale prototype (N=28). This paper offers a design exemplar of a large-scale, cyber-physical artifact that might support groups in shaping their identities, practices, and roles in the larger community.